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Can Australia afford the ABC?

by Anthony Cox

For purposes of this essay the ABC includes the SBS and
associated, other publicly funded media outlets such as The Conversation.

I grew up with the ABC. In my childhood the ABC seemed like
a beacon of calm and steadying influence amidst a cacophony of media excess
which featured page 3 bikini girls, back page sport hyperbole and sensationalised
news stables such as ‘headless body found in wheelie-bin’.

This is no longer the case. The ABC is a repository of progressive
viewpoints, aggressively promulgated on the main issues of the day: man-made climate
change [AGW], boat people, Islam. The progressive viewpoint is not so much a
reasoned position as an attitude suffused with a moral sensibility based on an
assumed superiority to opposing values. For instance AGW is accepted on the
basis that nature is good and benevolent and humans who interfere with nature
and persist in causing AGW are therefore not good. The same with the
boat-people and refugees in general. The plight of the boat-people makes their
moral position unassailable and people who argue against this moral position
are also bad.

The fact that people who argue against the boat-people or
AGW tend to be conservative dovetails with the political distinction between
the left-wing parties such as the ALP, who adopt the progressive mantle and
support AGW, boat-people and Islam, and the conservative parties who oppose the
progressive position on these issues.

In other words the ABC has taken a political position. This
contradicts its Charter and Statutory Standards of conduct. Those Standards
are:

Standards:4.1
Gather and present news and information with
due impartiality.

4.2
Present a diversity of perspectives so that,
over time, no significant strand of thought

or
belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately
represented.4.3
Do not state or imply that any perspective
is the editorial opinion of the ABC. The

ABC
takes no editorial stance other than its commitment to fundamental democraticprinciples
including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentarydemocracy
and equality of opportunity.4.4
Do not misrepresent any perspective.

4.5 Do not unduly favour one perspective over another.

In my opinion the ABC has contravened every one of these
Statutory Standards in its presentation of AGW.

A Recent ABC report illustrates this contravention. When the
International Panel for Climate Change [IPCC] released its 5th
report, AR5, the ABC unquestioningly accepted the usual alarm ridden
conclusions of AR5, ignored the manifest defects with AR5 and interviewed
the usual pro-AGW commentators. The standard practice was followed whereby a
prominent landmark, in this case Bondi Beach, was selected
and shown after AGW had its catastrophic effect.

The comments of these pro-AGW commentators shows the complete
lack of critical journalism by the ABC:

Penny Whetton, climatologist at CSIRO:

So that means - we're
quite used to rainfall being a significant limitation to agricultural
production and other activities. That may get worse in the future in the case
of Australia.

There was no mention of the fact that Whetton
is married to a Greens candidate, has endorsed Gore’s farcical film, An Inconvenient Truth, or is a lead
author for the IPCC and obviously an ardent supporter of AGW. Nor was there any
mention that the predictions of drought by AGW have been proved disastrously
wrong with the Wivenhoe dam disaster exacerbated by the dam being used as a
drought storage rather than a flood mitigator due to the AGW based predictions
of drought; or any mention of the billions of dollars spent on desalination
plants in capital cities around Australia, all in mothballs with huge rentals
still being paid to the builders; or any mention of the fact that actual
rainfall had contradicted the predictions made by AGW.

The ABC then wheeled out John Connor from the Climate
Institute. Connor is a devout supporter of AGW and his typical hyperbolic
language reflected that:

We are a country of
extremes, of floods and droughts, and they talk about climate change putting
the weather on steroids and so that means we have more and more extreme impacts
that accentuate those extremes that are there already.

“weather on steroids”; Connor is an expert
at giving pro-AGW news sources like the ABC pat catch-phrases. The ABC accepts
these statements without quibble; yet everything in what Connor said is false
and exaggerated. A cursory analysis would show that extreme weather events are
not occurring globally
or in Australia
and New Zealand. In fact the IPCC AR5 report itself disavows any connection
between AGW and extreme weather events in its SREX section. Chapter 4
of the SREX says:

§“There is medium evidence and
high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been
attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

§“The statement about the
absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate
change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”

§“The absence of an attributable
climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

So we have the ABC referring to the IPCC latest’s report and
interviewing known alarmists and pro-AGW persons who are interviewed about the
AR5 report and permitted to make absurd statements completely contradicting
what the IPCC report itself states! The ABC could hardly claim this was news
since Nature,
a pro-AGW journal, had said the same thing over a year previously.

Also, as usual, the ABC interviews no one who has a
sceptical position about AGW. The closest the ABC gets to an impartial
commentator is Dr Rob Brander, an academic specialising in coastal
geomorphology. In 2010 Dr Phil Watson, the principle coastal scientist with the
NSW Department of the Environment wrote a seminal
paper on Australian sea level which showed sea level rise is declining in
Australia and New Zealand. Yet while alarmists like Whetton and Connor and
Suzuki a week earlier, are giving carte blanche there is never a counter
opinion from people like Watson.

But this is Standard practice for the ABC. The many
prominent scientists critical of AGW do not get access to the ABC platform.
Professor Bob Carter is never interviewed; or Professor Stewart Franks; or
Professor Peter Ridd; or Professor Murray Salby; or Professor Michael Asten; or
Professor Garth Paltridge or any of the 1000s of sceptical scientists in
Australia or around
the world.

Advocates for AGW like Hamilton and Holmes
have strongly advocated that sceptics, or as they disparagingly say, “deniers”,
should not be given access to the ABC.

Sadly the ABC has taken this on board. Since the departure
of Jonathan Green, himself an avowed supporter of AGW, from the editor’s
position at The Drum, I personally have not had any articles accepted for
publication, nor has any prominent sceptic.

This is unacceptable. Not only does the ABC contradict its
own standards but it also sets a standard for the rest of the media community.
If the ABC is only presenting a pro-AGW viewpoint then that attitude will
permeate throughout the rest of the media community.

So not is the ABC
only presenting a pro-AGW viewpoint it is setting the standard of attitude
towards and treatment of those who are putting cogent arguments against AGW.

The argument for privatizing the ABC mainly consisted of the cost of the
ABC, which is well over $1 billion annually. However, this $1 billion is not
the real cost. The ABC’s support of AGW galvanizes and supports pro-AGW amidst
bureaucrats and politicians so that both sides of politics have pro-AGW
policies. These policies have already cost Australia over $12 billion and were likely to cost far more in the future if the
ALP/Green coalition stayed in power, and will still cost several billion under
the coalition’s Direct Action plan.

If one accepts the
premise that the ABC has been the main public media advocate for AGW then its
true cost to Australia has not just been the $1 billion annual funding cost but
the indirect cost to Australia of the many more $ billions spent and wasted on
AGW, all of which has been made publically palatable by the bias of the ABC.

It is on that basis
of the much larger cost to Australia that the question of whether Australia can
afford the ABC should be framed.

Like witchcraft in the early 17th century, the imaginary demons of global warming, climate change, and greenhouse gas as well as the fables of demons such as ocean acidification are broadly accepted in this modern mass psychosis. Had public broadcasting come of age four hundred years ago, it would have heralded the nonsense of witches, demons and sorcery just as the ABiasC does today.

Sir Henry Fraser has an impressive CV.
Barbados' newest knight, retired university professor, Dr. Henry Fraser, received the Accolade of Knight of St. Andrew, in the 2014 Independence Day Hours. Sir Henry Fraser was named as a result of The Knighthood of St. Andrew being bestowed on him for his outstanding contribution to the medical profession and representation of Barbadian culture, especially in the area of its architectural history.Sir Henry, a medical practitioner by profession, has worked for many years as a lecturer in medicine at the University of the West Indies and now serves as an Independent Senator in the Barbados Parliament where he has gained an outstanding reputation for his work on the historic treasures of Barbados.

He has received a plethora of other awards, including the UWI’s Pelican Award, Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary International and the Gold Crown of Merit (GCM) in the Barbados Honours of 1992.